PROJECT
Community Gardens in NYC
PROJECT DETAILS
This website is an informative tour of New York’s history of gentrification in the Lower East Side and the importance of community gardens in fighting against this dispossession. Seemingly mundane elements within our spaces can actually tell stories of an ongoing protest.
WORK CATEGORY
Frontend
ROLE
Creative Technologist
Software Engineer
YEAR
2020
TECHNOLOGIES
HTML
CSS3
Mapbox
CONCEPT
The Lower East Side was historically a neighborhood that was committed to housing working-class communities of color, primarily Black, Chinese, and Puerto Rican residents. However, following the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, tax incentives created by city officials and policy makers encouraged new developments in the surrounding areas of the Greenwich Village and SoHo, raising land values in the area. These higher rent values and new developments seeped into the Lower East Side, displacing lower-income populations who could not afford an increased rent. This process of gentrification gave power to white bodies who could afford to live in the space at these higher rates, while dispossesing primarily Black and Latino communities of their homes.
PROCESS
To effectively create a comphrensive tour of the gardens and history in Loisaida, I began by speaking with community garden leaders, including gardeners at La Plaza Cultural. I visited each garden in the area and took pictures of subleties and new developments like the Citi Bike Map.
